Re: Odp: voting results

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 550
Date: 1999-12-12

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller
To: Alexander Stolbov ; cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Sunday, December 12, 1999 8:13 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: voting results

Alexander:  First farmers appeared at the territory north of the Sahara
in the 6th mill.BC.
What a superfamily did they belong to? We can answer confidently - to
the
Nostratic one (or theoretically to the second hypotetical Near East
superfamily,
however I don't think so) because they had barley and wheat + sheep and
goats,
not millet + cattle.

Gerry:  I don't think all linguists will agree with you that the first
farmers belonged to the Nostratic family.  Piotr, can you help me out
with this?  And why are you saying they are Nostratic?  Because they had
barley and wheat + sheep and goats?  So folks with barley and wheat +
sheep and goats speak Nostratic?  Alexander, this is no different from
saying that what a person eats determines the language he speaks.   And
I thought we had concluded that this statement was absurd.  But perhaps
we hadn't.
Here I agree with your objections, Gerry. It is a little like asserting that Germans must have American ancestry because potatoes are so important in their culture. But perhaps all mankind comes from America: future archaeologists will unearth twentieth-century Coke empties all over the globe, and the oldest ones will be found in North America.
 
Forgive me this gross (and unfair) caricature of your argument, Alexander, but I'm generally against equating things like language, genetics, nationhood and material culture. Of course they tend to correlate with one another, but this tendency is easily thwarted bay various factors. When we're in the dark for lack of documented languages we tend to attach exaggerated importance to extralinguistic clues, no matter how unreliable, since they seem to offer some enlightenment. We say, for example, "the Kurgan culture can be iventified with the Proto-Indo-European culture", or we use expressions like "the Bell Beaker folk", or worse still "the Kurgans" and "the Beakers" (meaning linguistic communities), as if IE were a cultural, not a linguistic designation and as if barrows and beakers could speak.
 
As for Nostratic, the only kind of evidence for it I'm willing to consider is linguistic, as the Nostratic superfamily is supposed to be a linguistic concept. What I've read so far has left me unconvinced, and despite the enthusiastic attitude of the popular press towards the Nostratic hypothesis most historical linguists refuse to accept it for the very good reason that the linguistic evidence is shaky.
 
Piotr